WORD LISTS

Vocabulary from "D.F.W.'s Favorite Grammarian"

The novelist David Foster Wallace was obsessed with good writing, and taught students how to write well at two universities. He had his own takes on the timeless debates of grammar, and could hold court on the rather idiosyncratic rationales behind his beliefs. Wallace's Biographer, D.T. Max, profiles the relationship between Wallace and Bryan Gardner, editor of The Dictionary of Modern American Usage, in this New Yorker blog post.
D.F.W.’S Favorite Grammarian The New Yorker, December 11, 2013. If you are interested in David Foster Wallace and Grammar, you may want to take a look at
this Language Hat post, which offers evidence and analysis which suggests that he didn't quite know what he was talking about.

An additional
irony is that what D.F.W. and Garner, a professor of law at Southern Methodist University whose day job is to teach good writing to lawyers, sit down to talk about is the centrality, the permanence, the almost moral imperative to write well.

My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy,
turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose, are usually part of a discipline where the vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing, as a form of dress or speech or style that signals that “I am a member of this group,” gets thrown off.

My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy, turgid,
verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose, are usually part of a discipline where the vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing, as a form of dress or speech or style that signals that “I am a member of this group,” gets thrown off.

My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy, turgid, verbose,
abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose, are usually part of a discipline where the vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing, as a form of dress or speech or style that signals that “I am a member of this group,” gets thrown off.

My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract,
solecism-ridden prose, are usually part of a discipline where the vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing, as a form of dress or speech or style that signals that “I am a member of this group,” gets thrown off.

The guide included perennial
bugaboos like—or do I mean “such as”?—whether it was O.K. to end a sentence with a preposition (yes, fine) and the admissibility of split infinitives (depends on how many words separate the actual verb and its bereft partner).

The guide included perennial bugaboos like—or do I mean “such as”?—whether it was O.K. to end a sentence with a preposition (yes, fine) and the admissibility of split infinitives (depends on how many words separate the actual verb and its
bereft partner).

I reached the
itinerant professor by phone the other day in a D.C. hotel room—he is on the road two hundred days a year with his Sisyphean mission—and he told me that he and Wallace hadn’t met again until the interview four years afterward, but that they had exchanged letters in the interim.

Five years had passed since “Tense Present,” during which time D.F.W. had gone from a so-so school, Illinois State University, to a fancy one, Pomona College, and still he spent his days correcting students who mixed up “
nauseous” and “nauseated” and struggled to write clearly.

Five years had passed since “Tense Present,” during which time D.F.W. had gone from a so-so school, Illinois State University, to a fancy one, Pomona College, and still he spent his days correcting students who mixed up “nauseous” and “
nauseated” and struggled to write clearly.